The Meeting of Torako Lam
by storiewriter
Summary: Bentley makes Torako Lam's acquaintance. His first impression of her is 'loud.' (Transcendence AU)


**A/N:** In which Bentley finds his person and realizes that despite everything, the universe does really still hate him. Transcedence AU.

* * *

Bentley was scribbling his side of the conversation Alcor at lunch, minding his own business and stealing quick bites of food between words when somebody set their bento down in the seat across from his.

Alcor stopped mid-word, and Bentley looked up. It was a classmate he only vaguely recognized from Mathematical Magic as being one of the more boisterous people. They'd never actually really spoken, so he was understandably confused when she grinned and said, "Hey Ben! How's it hanging?"

"Uh," was his intelligent response. When she sat down and looked at her bento to unstack it, he shot a quick _what the hell_ look at Alcor, who jerked his shoulders up and then let them fall. Apparently it was called a 'shrug,' whatever that was.

"Yeah, we don't talk much do we?" The stranger laughed and glanced up from her box. "Hey, do you like musubi? My dad cooks it with too much soy and it kills me every time."

"Uh," Bentley repeated. He wanted to ask who she was, but he also really didn't want to embarrass himself more than he usually did. "I…guess?"

"Here you go then!" She slid the top box over, and Bentley stared down in it in confusion. There were two musubi, yes, but also a pile of seaweed salad.

He pointed at it with his chopsticks. "Um."

With a dismissive wave, she set into the second half of her bento. "Eh, take it. Too much of a pain to separate it out."

"Okay," Bentley said, but didn't go for the offered food.

"Is she bothering you?" Alcor said, and he glanced out of the corner of his eye to see the demon narrowing his eyes at the other teenager. "Is it poisoned? Do I need to drive her off?"

Bentley frowned and scribbled _NO_ on his MSS notes app, and underlined it a couple times for good measure.

"She might be a bully though! You're worried about bullies. I could turn her dumplings into inside-out sea urchins if you'd like me to."

Bentley added a couple exclamation marks to his message.

"So…what're you writing there? Do you even eat?"

He stiffened and swiped the screen dark. "Nothing," he said, and then reached over to his bento and snagged a piece of _chamchi gimbap_ with his fingers. The seaweed wrapping stuck to his skin, but he scraped the lingering bits off with his teeth. Maybe if he didn't socialize with the girl across from him, she'd go away?

"I can get rid of her for you," Alcor said, and he was uncomfortably close to Bentley's ear. Bentley scowled harder and ate another piece of _gimbap_. He loved it when his father made it, and it was pretty cheap.

"What kind of _gimpab_ is that?"

He glanced up at her. She was leaning over her bento box, long hair draped across her shoulder. It was thick and had a bit of a curl to it, and some strands came dangerously close to her box of furikake-sprinkled rice and cooked asparagus. "Tuna," he said, and looked back down.

She _aaaah_ 'd. "Oh, _chamchi_? Cool. Hey, my name's Torako. Torako Lam. We're in Mamath together."

"Oh. Okay," he said. Etiquette took his tongue and he stared in the middle of her forehead as he replied, "I'm Bentley Farkas. Nice to meet you."

"Yeah, I know that. Thanks though." She snickered into her mouthful of food, and looked up at Bentley. "Nice to meet you too."

When the signal for the end of lunch sounded, they packed up their lunches. Bentley handed back Torako's musubi box, having touched none of the food inside. "Sorry," he said. "I had enough though."

"It's fine," Torako said with a smile too wide to be sincere. "See you later?"

They watched her run off, and then Bentley turned to go to his next class.

"Well," Alcor said, cheery and floating by Bentley's side. He'd agreed to let the demon tag along two days of the school week if he wasn't too disruptive, so he was unfortunately stuck with constant companionship. "That's the end of that, I guess."

* * *

It was not the end of it, as it turned out.

"Is this seat taken?"

Bentley's attention snapped up from his MSS pad, which was littered with nonsensical sketches at Alcor's prompting, to Torako, who was gesturing to the seat next to his. It was, as usual, empty.

"What the hell's she doing back?" Alcor sounded both put out and excited.

"No…" Bentley said, and glanced over to where she usually sat with her sporty teammates. They weren't looking, but they should have been—at least, that's what Bentley thought.

"Awesome!" Torako flung her bag over the back of her seat and slumped down into it. She grabbed a fistful of her hair and hefted it in her hand. "Hey, I've been wanting a second opinion on this, but do you think I should get this cut? It's cool and all, but damn does it take a lot of time to wash. Where'd you get your hair done?"

"Aka Hair," he said, staring at the teacher's stand and hoping that they'd arrive soon. Mathematical Magic wasn't his favorite subject, and it took a lot of studying to maintain decent grades, but he wanted it to start _now_.

"Oh, them! Man, they did a good job on your hair—d'you think I should dye mine too?"

Bentley tried to keep his mouth shut, but what came out was, "I dyed it," and he made the second mistake of looking at Torako as he spoke.

Eyes wide, she leaned across the aisle and put her clasped hands on his desk. "Seriously?"

Biting the inside of his lip, he looked away and tried to keep the embarrassment off his face. Judging from Alcor's snickers, he wasn't being too successful. "Yeah."

"That's so cool!" Torako exclaimed, rather loudly. Bentley flinched and chanced a look around the classroom; there were a few people who had now noticed and were expressing various forms of confusion.

Bentley tipped his head to the side in noncommittal agreement and kept his eyes down on his MSS pad, taking in the spiky-branched tree that Alcor'd been describing. He didn't say anything.

"I think I like her, actually," Alcor mused from somewhere over Bentley's head. "She's spunky. And nice to you. This could be good."

Whatever that meant.

"All right, class, listen up!" Mx. Alonso Ramirez said, rapping their knuckles against the wall as they entered, wild hair barely kept tame with a thick bandana. "We've got a group project to start, so get into pairs. Quickly now, please!"

It was with a sudden, horrible feeling of realization that Bentley knew what Torako was going to say next. He also knew that he would have no other choice than to say yes.

"Hey, cool! You wanna be partners?"

What he really wanted to do was hunker down in his seat and just cry from the feelings of _why me_ and the tiny bit of hope thinking that maybe he'd finally have a friend and just being overwhelmed by her personality. Instead, Bentley mumbled, "Sure."

Her voice was deafening when she spoke up. "Heyyy, Mx. Alonso Ramirezzzz, Bentley and I are gonna be partners!"

"Then come write it up here on the board," Mx. Alonso called back. Bentley looked up at Torako, and she was grinning wide and hard and loud.

"This is going to be great," she told Bentley, and made her way up to the board to write their names down.

Bentley hoped she was right, but after chancing a glance up at Alcor and seeing the latter's sharp, tooth-bared smile, he remembered that life hated him. So no, he thought, resting his chin on his palm and trying not to think of all the ways this could go wrong. No, it wouldn't be.

* * *

When they stepped through the entrance to Bentley's apartment, Torako never having stopped talking the entire way over, he was ready to hole himself up in his room for an hour while his dad go to know his over-enthusiastic classmate. What he got instead was Tyrone Pines sitting at the kitchen table, an ancient looking bag in the seat next to him.

"Oh, hey!" Tyrone said and Bentley was about ready to smack him, ancient Lord of Nightmares or not. He should have expected something like this. He should have. "Bentley, you're home! And who's this?"

Bentley smiled for show, his teeth grinding together and his eyes mere slits. "Tyrone, I didn't know that you'd be here."

"Ooooh, I just thought I'd stop by." Tyrone leaned over the table and waved at Torako behind Bentley. "Heyyy! I'm Bentley's friend, Tyrone Pines. Do you want to be his friend too?"

Torako laughed behind him. "Hey! I didn't know Bentley had a friend. I'm Torako Lam—what school do you go to?"

"Yes, shouldn't you _not be here right now_?" Bentley asked, pulling off his shoes and pushing them into the cubby in the wall. "Just put them there," he told Torako, and her hair swayed as she bent to do the same.

"Oh, I'm homeschooled!" Tyrone warbled, and Bentley shot him an uneasy glance. Alcor had been better about maintaining a human façade, but there were times when he did something decidedly uncanny and Bentley did not need that happening in front of a virtual stranger. "And haha, yeah, I usually stop by the library for a couple hours before heading over here—Just had an urge to see my good buddy Bentley, I guess!"

Torako moved past him. "Well, nice to meet you I guess! Hey Bentley, where's the bathroom?"

"Just to your left," Bentley said. "First door."

"Thanks!" She waved and moved to the door next to the hallway. As soon as she'd shut it, Bentley stalked over to Alcor and only just resisted jabbing a finger in Tyrone's face.

"You. What are you doing."

Alcor's eyes flickered between human and demonic as he crossed them to keep Bentley's finger in view. When he snapped them back, they were brown on white. "Whaaaat? I'm not allowed to see my best friend in the whole wide world?"

Instead of answering, Bentley crossed his arms and tapped his foot. Frowning, he did his best to intimidate Tyrone into giving him answers.

It didn't quite work. Tyrone shrugged. "I mean, I think you shoulda seen this coming, but if you didn't, that's no skin off my nose!"

Bentley might not have understood why skin would be taken off Alcor's nose under any circumstances, but he understood the sentiment. "You— _that's_ why you pressured me into offering the apartment space? _That's_ why you disappeared at the end of school?"

"It wasn't really pressuring…" Tyrone tipped back on two legs of the chair and stuck his tongue out. Bentley really, really wanted to shout but Torako was in the next room and he needed to keep this conversation down.

"You kept singing in my ear that Torako and I should work here!" Bentley hissed. There was a hissing sound that denoted the flush of the toilet, and he added, "Where's my dad anyways?"

Alcor grinned. "I let him know you were inviting a friend over and he went out to get dinner."

Bentley buried his face in his hands and let out a quiet, strangled cry. Looking on the bright side wasn't enough here; letting people into the apartment without permission may have earned him a lecture, but even that was preferable to the overjoyful tizzy that inviting over a _friend_ would send his father into. Bentley was reminded of the dinner fiasco when he'd first introduced Tyrone Pines to his dad, and he stamped his feet in frustration.

The door to the bathroom slid open, and Torako was speaking the moment she exited the room. "I like the blue in your bathroom a lot! It's a very calming shade, and—Bentley, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," he said into his palms, staring at the cracks of light visible through his fingers.

"…if you say so." Torako sounded understandably doubtful, so Bentley let his hands fall and raised his head. The smile on his face was a bit painful.

"Really," he lied. "It's fine. Why don't we head into my room? We'll probably get more done in there."

Alcor spoke up behind him. "Okay, got it! I'll cover for you; don't be too loud, it'll make me look bad in front of your dad!"

Bentley frowned and turned to face Tryone Pines even as Torako burst out into startled laughter behind him. "What? We're just going over a project for school, I doubt that we'll get into a shouting match or anything."

There was a hand on his shoulder even as he tried to puzzle out why Alcor's smile different _kind_ of sharp than usual. "Right right, thanks Tyrone," Torako said. "I promise that we'll keep the noise down to a minimum; I doubt he'd let me do anything more than snog him, so it shouldn't be too hard."

Understanding hit him hard while being steered towards the hallway. "What?" he screeched. "I—Just— _Tyrone!_ "

Torako laughed again, and he somehow heard Tyrone call out over her, "That didn't sound like a no!"

"You _jerk_!" Bentley howled, and his heart skipped the instance later because that was a demon behind him and he just insulted him and—

Tyrone just kept snickering and really, Bentley was being too paranoid. He have known better by then that Alcor might be a little shit, but he also didn't get murderous over Bentley biting back.

"Sorry about him," Bentley apologized.

"It's fine!" Torako said. "By the way, which room's yours? Right or left? I was guessing when I pushed you down this doorway, but I really have no idea where I am."

Bentley grumbled, "The right," and found his feet again. He took the next few steps himself and tapped his fingers on the opening mechanism to the door. It slid open and he walked in, slinging his bag off as he went.

He sat on the ground, expecting Torako to have done the same, but she had made a beeline for his desk. "Oh, wow! Did you do all this?"

"Um, probably." Bentley craned his neck up to see his desk better. "What's on there?"

Torako turned around and waved one of his origami frogs around. "It's so tiny! And cute! And there's awesome paper spiraly pictures and patterned paper things and is that actually a wrapper for a rice box?"

He felt his face get hot and looked away. "Yeah," he said, thinking of all the beautiful papers in the art shop downtown and what he could do with something that high quality. "They're not that great though."

"Are you kidding me! These are awesome—wait wait wait, is this a _sigil_?"

When he turned his face back up, Torako was already there, crouching. She was holding one of his recent projects in front of her bent knees, an intense expression on her face. When he studied the piece, he noticed the interwoven sigil and nodded.

"Yeah, it's for—"

"For 'cleanliness,' or 'purity,' right? And is that an 'air' symbol squeezed in there? Is this for cleaning the air somewhere?"

Bentley blinked. "Uh, yeah. You know sigils?"

Torako sat down on her rear and handed over the unfinished project. She was very careful about it; it surprised Bentley to see her so delicate with something. "Of course I do! I love sigils, they're great and useful and I can't believe that people snubbed them in the past for not being flexible enough!"

"They are pretty rigid," Bentley offered, somewhat timidly. He placed the project to the side, far enough away that they wouldn't disturb it and close enough that he wouldn't forget and step on it later.

She laughed and leaned back, legs akimbo. "Says the guy who's making a piece of art with a utilitarian purpose! I bet that nobody's thought about that before!"

Bentley tilted his head and scratched the back of his neck. He mumbled, "There are lots of problems though. I don't know how to integrate the activation line, and the sigil needs to have a longevity component added in and I don't know how to do that without disrupting the bits for purity and air or acting only upon the piece itself rather than the atmosphere around it."

For a moment, Torako was very quiet. He found himself glancing up at her, and the surprise on her face made him blink. She leaned forward, then whispered, "Snapping Seagulls you're a fucking genius, aren't you."

Immediately, he raised his hands. "No, I'm really not! I just—Dad has a lot of biblofiles on them and I got bored while he was working and I finished my school stuff and so I read a lot and it seemed interesting so I tried it out and it's really just normal, isn't it?"

Torako raised her hands and grabbed his. She stared him in the eye. "Bentley. Why does the school make students take an entry exam for Rudimentary Sigils?"

"…So that we know what we're getting into?" That was it, wasn't it? Bentley thought it made sense, but by the way Torako's eyebrows were drawn together, that wasn't quite true.

"Bentley. It's heavy crap. I know because my Dad works in Sigils as a theoretical scientist, and my Father has worked with stuffy Sigilist academists. I've grown up in it."

"Really?" He asked.

Torako sighed and let go of his hands, the calluses on her palms rasping against the back of his hands. "Yes. To answer my own question, the school does it so that yes, students know what they're getting into, but also so that the teachers know who has the drive or the talent for it."

"Oh," he said.

She propped her chin on her palm and studied him for a while. He fidgeted under the scrutiny. "Did you know that there's some mathematical theory behind the working of sigils?"

"Kind of…" He really wanted to ask why she'd changed the subject so suddenly, but figured that the less attention he called to himself, the better.

Nodding sharply, she curled her fingers up against her chin and rubbed them back and forth. "Right. I know my Dad has a ton of sources, or at least access to them, so we can maybe work on that tomorrow or over the weekend. In the meantime, we can do some topic searching and settle on a couple possibilities. I know that Mx. Alonso Ramirez wants some ideas tomorrow, so we'll be set if we focus on that tonight. I'm sure we can pull something together by dinner—your dad wanted to invite me over?"

"Uh," Bentley said, honestly not understanding what was happening. "Yes? And why are we talking about the school project all of the sudden?"

Torako grinned at him, and it was startlingly similar to the grin he sometimes saw on Alcor's face. "Silly, we're doing a project on a subset of magic that has some mathematical theory. I figure that we're both pretty damn informed on sigils, and that you're a flaming genius when it comes to them, and that I've got the connections. We can totally do something on this!"

He smiled a little, and it came easier. "Oh. Oh! Yeah, that sounds great—I probably wouldn't have come up with that on my own and—wow, wouldn't this be a big project? Isn't this college-thesis worthy?"

She leaned forward, eyes bright. "Of course! What use would it be if it weren't challenging? We're going to blow all the other projects out of the water, and maybe we can get into Rudimentary Sigils early with it! Damn this is going to be amazing—do you have your MSS on? I really want to work on it—maybe look up the ratio of curvilinear to straight lines in specific sigils or the theory behind effectiveness of different line lengths with different types of sigils, or I don't know!"

The gears started turning, and he pulled his MSS out of his bag. His heartrate accelerated, and he got that heady feeling when he was engrossed in something so new and exciting it hurt. "Oh, yeah, that actually sounds cool. What about…you know sigil fusion and how it's hard—do the mathematical principles of each individual sigil have to match up with each other? Isn't that a thing? It makes sense in my head."

"That makes a lot of sense, actually." Torako turned and pulled her own, more advanced version of an MSS out of her bag. In an instant she had thumbed it on and was typing key words into a search engine. There was a sort of…well, Bentley thought, a fire in her eyes, and her shoulders were tense. "Oh my god, do you think—I'm not sure there's a lot of research that's been done on it, but we can always grill my parents and see what they know, and—are you free tomorrow?"

"Definitely," Bentley said, then took a mental step back. He paused in typing in his own keywords and raised his head. "Well. I mean. I'll have to ask my dad about it and—isn't this project due next week?"

"Fuck yes it is," She said, swiping her finger up and down and from side to side as she sorted out the results. "If we have to—and if you're okay with it, I mean—we can always crash at each other's places while we do this because it's going to be amazing and it's going to blow everybody's _minds_."

"I mean," he said, but internally he was screaming yes with all his might because this was his jam and he was so happy that somebody else felt this way about sigils, "again, I'll have to ask, but I don't think it'll be a problem."

Torako looked up and bared her teeth in an almost predatory grin. "We're going to rock this thing."

And Bentley—though he hadn't wanted to meet her, though he hadn't really wanted to work with her—felt so excited about doing this project with Torako Lam that he couldn't speak for a moment. What came out when he did was, "Why did you sit with me today?"

This time, she was the one who didn't quite understand what he was saying. She paused and drew back just a bit. "Huh?"

Bentley almost waved the question off, but told himself that if he'd just accepted the potential of sleepovers, then he should ask away. "I mean. We never talked before today. Why did you sit with me at lunch and in class?"

"Oh," she said, and leaned back, MSS in her lap. "Well. You seemed lonely. And I guess I just wanted to get to know you. You didn't do so hot the first few weeks of school, and then you isolated yourself, and I dunno, I was worried."

He chewed on the side of his lip and averted his eyes. "Oh. Um."

Torako broke the silence by reaching her fist out and nudging him in the shoulder with her knuckles. "No biggie, man. Hey, you're a cool guy, and it's not often I find somebody to talk advanced topics and overachieving natures with. Like, my hurling teammates and my primary buds are great and all, and I love them, but there's always room for more, you know."

Tentatively, he brought his gaze back to her. He looked into her eyes, flitting between one and the other, and then the corners of his mouth twitched up. Maybe life didn't hate him. Maybe things would turn out okay, maybe this would be a good thing.

He opened his mouth to thank her, and then Tyrone's reedy voice filtered in through the walls. "Oh, Philip? No, Bentley didn't bring a girl into his room and shut the door. No sir, not at all, and there was no mention of maybe snogging involved. Haha! Certainly nothing else either—it's been suspiciously quiet in there, no noise at all!"

Then he remembered that there was Alcor and what came out of his mouth was, "I'm going to kill him."

Torako laughed, loud and booming, and when his father knocked on the door to check that there was nothing mature happening, she collapsed in on herself, wheezing with mirth. Bentley fell onto his side and tapped the side of the frame, opening the door and glaring up at both his bemused father and Tyrone, who was peering in with eyes that positively cackled.

"I'm going to kill you," he said to Alcor, who just smirked and made some sort of ancient but undoubtedly obscene gesture.

Maybe the universe hated him after all.


End file.
